Posts about journalism

The Flight to Quality is on the Runway

March 4, 2018 by Jeff Jarvis
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Sometimes, things need to get bad before they can get good. Such is the case, I fear, with content, conversation, and advertising on the net. But I see signs of progress.

First let’s be clear: No one — not platforms, not ad agencies and networks, not brands, not media companies, not government, not users — can stand back and say that disinformation, hate, and incivility are someone else’s problem to solve. We all bear responsibility. We all must help by bringing pressure and demanding quality; by collaborating to define what quality is; by fixing systems that enable manipulation and exploitation; and by contributing whatever resources we have (ad dollars to links to reporting bad actors).

Last May, I wrote about fueling a flight to quality. Coming up on a year later, here’s what I see happening:

Platforms:

  • Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey recently posted a thread acknowledging his company’s responsiblity to the health and civility of the public conversation and asking for help in a bunch of very knotty issues balancing openness with civility, free speech with identifying and stopping harassment and disinformation. It is an important step.
  • Facebook made what I now come to understand was an unintended but critical mistake at the start of News Feed when it threw all “public content” into one big tub with few means for identifying differences in quality. Like Twitter and like the net culture itself, Facebook valued openness and equality. But when some of that content — especially Russian disinformation and manipulation campaigns — got them in trouble, they threw out the entire tub of bathwater. Now they’re trying to bring some of the better babies back by defining and promoting quality news. This, too, involves many difficult questions about the definitions of quality and diversity. But when it is done, I hope that good content can stand out.
  • In that post last May, I wrote about how Google Search would thenceforth account for the reliability, authority, and quality of sources in ranking. Bravo. I believe we will see that as a critical moment in the development of the net. But as we see in the news about Logan Paul and Alex Jones on YouTube, there is still work to be done on the ad side of the company. A system that enables platforms to give audience and major brands to give financial support to the likes of Jones is broken. Can we start there?

Advertising:

  • Through the News Integrity Initiative,* we helped start an effort called Open Brand Safety to identify the worst, low-hanging, rotten fruit of disinformation sites to help advertisers shun them. It’s still just a bare beginning. But through it, we have seen that not-insignificant amounts of ad dollars still go to known crap sites.
  • That is why I’ve joined an effort to organize a meeting later this month, bringing together the many organizations trying to identify signals of quality v. crap with representatives from platforms, ad networks, ad agencies, brands, NGOs, and others. I do not believe the solution is one-size-fits-all black lists and white lists, for it is impossible to define trust and quality for everyone — Gerber and Red Bull have different standards for advertising, as they should. What I’ve been arguing for is a network made up of all these constituencies to share signals of quality or a lack of it so each company can use that information to inform decisions about ranking, promotion, ad buys, and so on. I’ll report more when this happens.

I’ve spoken with the people in these companies and I believe their sincerity in trying to tackle this problem. I also see the complexity of the issues involved. We all want to preserve the openness of our internet but we also have to acknowledge that that openness makes the net vulnerable to manipulation by bad actors. So, to start, we need to recognize, reveal, and counteract that manipulation while also identifying and supporting good content.

It is because I believe in the need for openness that I will continue to argue that the the internet is not a medium and the platforms are not publishers. When the net is viewed as a next-generation medium like a newspaper or TV network, that brings perilous presumptions — namely that the net should be edited and packaged like a media property. I don’t want that. I treasure the openness and freedom that allow me to blog and say whatever I want and to find and hear voices I never was able to hear through the eye of media’s needle.

I also think it’s important to recognize that scale is a double-edged sword: It is the scale of the net and the platforms that enables anyone anywhere to speak to anyone else without need of capital, technical expertise, or permission. But it is also scale that makes the problems being addressed here so difficult to attack. No, the platforms should not — I do not want them to — pass judgment on everything that is posted on the net through them. I do not want the platforms to be my or your editor, to act like media or to build a Chinese internet.

But the platforms — and media companies like them — can no longer sit back and argue that they are just mirrors to society. Society warped and cracked itself to exploit their weaknesses. Facebook is not blameless in enabling Russian disinformation campaigns; YouTube is not blameless in creating a mechanism that allows and pays for Alex Jones to spew his bile; Twitter is not blameless in helping to foster incivility. Add to that: news organizations are not blameless in helping to spread disinformation and give it attention, and in fueling polarization and incivility. The ad industry is not blameless in helping to support the manipulators, spammers, trolls, and haters. Law enforcement is not blameless when it does not alert platforms and media companies to intelligence about bad actors. And you — yes, you and I — are not blameless when we share, click on, laugh at, encourage, and fail to report the kind of behavior that threatens our net.

Every effort I mention here is just a beginning. Every one of them is entangled with knotty questions. We need to help each other tackle this problem and protect our net. We need to discuss our mutual, moral responsibility to society and to an informed, civil, and productive public conversation.

There is much more to be done: Journalists and news organizations need to help the platforms define quality (wisely but generously to continue to encourage new and diverse voices). Journalists should also get smarter about not being exploited by manipulators. And news organizations need to do much more to build bridges between communities in conflict to foster understanding and empathy. The platforms, researchers, law enforcement, and NGOs should share alerts about manipulation they see to cut the bad guys off at the pass. Ad networks and platforms have to make it possible for advertisers to support the quality not the crap (and not claim ignorance of where their dollars go). Consumers — now banded together by campaigns like Sleeping Giants and Grab Your Wallet — need to continue to put pressure on platforms, brands, agencies, and networks and thereby give them cover so they are empowered to do what’s right.

Above all, let’s please remember that the internet is not ruined just because there are a few assholes on it. This, too, is why I insist on not seeing the net as a medium. It is Times Square. On Times Square, you can find pickpockets and bad Elmos and idiots, to be sure. But you also find many more nice tourists from Missoula and Mexico City and New Yorkers trying to dodge them on their way to work. Let’s bring some perspective to the media narrative about the net today. Please go take a look at your Facebook or Twitter or Instagram feeds or any Google search. I bet you will not find them infested with nazis and Russians and trolls, oh, my. I  bet you will still find, on the whole, decent people like you and me. I fear that if we get carried away by moral panic we will end up not with a bustling Times Square of an internet but with China or Singapore or Iran as the model for a controlled digital future.

The net is good. We can and should make it better. We must protect it. That’s what these efforts are about.

*Disclosure: NII is funded by Facebook, Craig Newmark, the Ford Foundation, AppNexus, and others.

What Makes a Community?

January 17, 2018 by Jeff Jarvis
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Facebook wants to build community. Ditto media. Me, too.

But I fear we are all defining and measuring community too shallowly and transiently. Community is not conversation — though that is a key metric Facebook will use to measure its success. Neither is community built on content: gathering around it, paying attention to it, linking to it, or talking about it — that is how media brands are measuring engagement. Conversation and content are tools or byproducts of real community.

Community means connecting people intimately and over time to share interests, worldviews, concerns, needs, values, empathy, and action. Facebook now says it wants to “prioritize posts that spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people.” I think that should be meaningful, lasting, and trusting interactions among people, plural. Think of community not as a cocktail party (or drunken online brawl) where friends and strangers idly chat. Instead, think of community a club one chooses to join, the sorts of clubs that society has been losing since my parents’ generation grew old. Meetuphas been trying to rebuild them. So should we all.

What if instead of just enabling people to share and talk about something — content — Facebook created the means for people to organize a modern, digital Rotary Club of concerned citizens who want to improve their circumstances for neighbors, geographic or virtual? Or it provides pews and pulpits where people can flock as congregations of shared belief. Or it opens the basement in that house of worship where addicts come to share their stories and needs. Or it creates the tools for a community of mutual support to reach out and lift each other up. Or it makes a classroom where people come to share knowledge and skills. Or it creates the means to build a craft union or guild for professionals to share and negotiate standards for quality. Or it builds the tools for citizens to join together in a positive social movement…. And what if journalism served these communities by informing their conversations and actions, by reflecting their desires, by answering their information needs, by convening them into dialogue, by helping to resolve instead of inflame conflict?

That is community. That is belonging. That is what Facebook and media should be enabling. I’ll reprise my definition of journalism from the other day as the imperative Facebook and news share:

Convening communities into civil, informed, and productive conversation, reducing polarization and building trust through helping citizens find common ground in facts and understanding.

How can we convene communities if we don’t really know what they are, if we are satisfied with mere conversation — yada, yada, yada — as a weak proxy for community?

While doing research for another project on the state of the mass, I recently read the 1959 book by sociologist William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society, and reread Raymond Williams’ 1958 book, Culture & Society. I found lessons for both Facebook and media in their definitions of connected community vs. anonymous mass.

Kornhauser worries that “there is a paucity of independent groups” [read: communities] to protect people “from manipulation and mobilization.” In a proper pluralist and diverse society, he argues, “the population is unavailable [for such manipulation] in that people possess multiple commitments to diverse and autonomous groups.” To communities. “When people are divorced from their communites and work, they are free to reunite in new ways.” They are feed for trolls and totalitarians.

Thus we find ourselves working under a false definition of community — accepting any connection, any conversation, any link as qualification — and we end up with something that looks like a mob or a mass: singular, thin, and gross. “The mass man substitutes an undifferentiated image of himself for an individualized one,” Kornhauser says; “he answers the perennial question of ‘Who am I?’ with the formula ‘I am like everyone else.’” He continues:

The autonomous man respects himself as an individual, experiencing himself as the bearer of his own power and having the capacity to determine his life and to affect the lives of his fellows…. Non-pluralist society lacks the diversity of social worlds to nurture and sustain independent persons…. [I]n pluralist society there are alternative loyalties (sanctuaries) which do not place the noncomformist outside the social pale.

In other words, when you cannot find a community to identify with, you are anonymously lumped in with — or lump yourself in with — the mob or the mass. But when you find and join with other people with whom you share affinity, you have the opportunity to express your individuality. That is the lovely paradox of community: real community supports the individual through joining while the mass robs of us of our individuality by default. The internet, I still believe, is built so we can both express our individuality and join with other individuals in communities. That is why I value sharing and connection.

And that is why I have urged Facebook — and media — to find the means to introduce us to each other, to make strangers less strange, to rob the trolls and totalitarians of the power of the Other. How? By creating safe spaces where people can reveal themselves and find fellows; by creating homes for true communities; and by connecting them.

That is what might get us out of this mess of Trumpian, Putinistic, fascistic, racist, misogynistic, exclusionary hate and fear and rule by the mob. There’s nothing easy in that task for platforms or for journalists. But for God’s sake, we must try.

Now you might say that what is good for the goose is good for the nazi: that the same tools that are used to build my hip, digital Rotary Club can be used by the white supremicists to organize their riot in Charlottesville or advertise their noxious views to the vulnerable. Technology is neutral, eh? Perhaps, but society is not. Society judges by negotiating and setting standards and norms. A healthy society or platform or media or brand should never tolerate, distribute, or pay for the nazi and his hate. This means that Facebook — like Google and like the media — will need to give up the pretense of neutrality in the face of manipulation and hate. They must work to bring communities together and respect the diverse individuals in them.

“An atomized society invites the totalitarian movement,” Kornhauser warns. In mass society, the individual who does not conform to the group is the cuck; in totalitarian society, he is a criminal. In pluralist, open, and tolerant society, the individual who does not conform to someone else’s definition of the whole is free to find his or her community and self. That is the connected net society we must help build. Or as Kornhauser puts it, in terms we can understand today: “A pluralist society supports a liberal democracy, whereas a mass society supports a populist democracy.” Trump and his one-third base are built on populism, while the two-thirds majority (not “the mass”) of the nation disapproves. But our platforms and our media are not built to support that majority. They pay attention to Trump’s base because mass media is built for the mass and conflict and platforms are built as if all connections are the same.

In the end, Kornhauser is optimistic, as am I. “[T]hese conditions of modern life carry with them both the heightened possibility of social alienation andenhanced opportunities for the creation of new forms of association.” We can use Facebook, Twitter, et al to snap and snark at each other or to find ourselves in others and join together. The platforms and media can and should help us — but the choice, once offered, is ours to take.

I’ll end with these words of sociologist Raymond Williams:

If our purpose is art, education, the giving of information or opinion, our interpretation will be in terms of the rational and interested being. If, on the other hand, our purpose is manipulation — the persuasion of a large number of people to act, feel, think, know, in certain ways — the convenient formula will be that of the masses….

To rid oneself of the illusion of the objective existence of ‘the masses’, and to move towards a more actual and more active conception of human beings and relationships, is in fact to realize a new freedom.

Facebook’s changes

January 11, 2018 by Jeff Jarvis
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[Disclosure: I raised $14 million from Facebook, the Craig Newmark and Ford foundations, and others to start the News Integrity Initiative. I personally receive no money from and am independent of Facebook.]

So, here’s what’s on my mind about Facebook’s changes, just announced by Mark Zuckerberg, to “prioritize posts that spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people” over content from media and brands.

Yes, I’m worried. Let me start there.

I’m worried that now that Facebook has become a primary distributor of news and information in society, it cannot abrogate its responsibility — no matter how accidentally that role was acquired — to help inform our citizenry.

I’m worried that news and media companies — convinced by Facebook (and in some cases by me) to put their content on Facebook or to pivot to video — will now see their fears about having the rug pulled out from under them realized and they will shrink back from taking journalism to the people where they are having their conversations because there is no money to be made there.

I’m worried for Facebook and Silicon Valley that both media and politicians will use this change to stir up the moral panic about technology I see rising in Europe and now in America.

But…

I am hopeful that Facebook’s effort to encourage “meaningful interactions” could lead to greater civility in our conversations, which society desperately needs. The question is: Will Facebook value and measure civility, intelligence, and credibility or mere conversation? We know what conversation alone brings us: comments and trolls. What are “meaningful interactions?”

And…

I wish that Facebook would fuel and support a flight to quality in news. Facebook has lumped all so-called “public content” into one, big, gnarly bucket. It is is dying to get rid of the shit content that gets them into political and PR trouble and that degrades the experience on Facebook and in our lives. Fine. But they must not throw the journalistic baby out with the trolly bathwater. Facebook needs to differentiate and value quality content — links to The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, and thousands of responsible, informative, useful old and new news outlets around the world.

I wish that Facebook would make clear that it will not use this change to exploit media companies for more advertising revenue when the goal is to inform the public.

I wish that Facebook would not just connect us with the people we know and agree with — our social filter bubbles — but also would devote effort to making strangers less strange, to robbing the demagogues and hate mongers of their favorite weapon: the Other. That, I firmly believe, is the most valuable thing Facebook could do to combat polarization in our world: creating safe spaces where people can share their lives and perspectives with others, helping to build bridges among communities.

I wish that Facebook would work with journalists to help them learn how to use Facebook natively to inform the public conversation where and when it occurs. Until now, Facebook has tried to suck up to media companies (and by extension politicians) by providing distribution and monetization opportunties through Instant Articles and video. Oh, well. So much for that. Now I want to see Facebook help news media make sharable journalism and help them make money through that. But I worry that news organizations will be gun-shy of even trying, sans rug.

So…

I have been rethinking my definition of journalism. It used to be: helping communties organize their knowledge to better organize themselves. That was an information-based definition.

After our elections in the U.S., the U.K., Austria, Germany, and elsewhere, I have seen that civility is a dire need and a precondition for journalism and an informed society. So now I have a new definition for journalism, an imperative that I believe news organizations share with Facebook (if it is serious about building communities).

My new definition of journalism: convening communities into civil, informed, and productive conversation, reducing polarization and building trust through helping citizens find common ground in facts and understanding.

Will Facebook’s changes help or hurt that cause? We shall see.

LATER: One more thought overnight on what publishers and Facebook should do now: Facebook makes it clear that the best way to get distribution there is for users to share and talk about your links. Conversation is now a key measure of value in Facebook.

The wrong thing to do would be to make and promote content that stirs up short and nasty conversation: “Asshole.” “Fuck you.” “No, fuck you, troll.” “Cuck.” “Nazi.” You know the script. I don’t want to see media move from clickbait to commentbait. Facebook won’t value that. No one will.

The right thing to do — as I have been arguing for almost two years — is to bring journalism to people on Facebook (and Twitter and Snap and Instagram and YouTube…) natively as part of people’s conversations. The easiest example, which I wrote about here, is the meme that someone passes along because it speaks for them, because it adds facts and perspectives to their conversation. There are many other forms and opportunities to make shareable, conversational journalism; a colleague is planning to create a course at CUNY Journalism School around just that.

The problem that will keep publishers from doing this is that there are few ways to monetize using Facebook as Facebook should be used. I’ve been arguing to Facebook for more than two years that they should see Jersey Shore Hurricane News as a model of native news on Facebook — with its loyal members contributing and conversing about their community — and that they should help its creator, Justin Auciello, make money there. Instead, Facebook has had to play to large, established publishers’ desires to distribute the content they have. So Facebook created formats for self-contained content — Instant Articles and videos — with the monetization within. Facebook and publishers painted themselves into a corner by trying to transpose old forms of media into a new reality. Now they’re admitting that doesn’t work.

But journalism and news clearly do have a place on Facebook. Many people learn what’s going on in the world in their conversations there and on the other social platforms. So we need to look how to create conversational news. The platforms need to help us make money that way. It’s good for everybody, especially for citizens.

Death to the Mass(es)!

December 29, 2017 by Jeff Jarvis
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In the tweets above, leading journalists Ezra Klein and Anne Applebaum reflect the accepted wisdom, raison d’être, and foundational myth of their field: that journalism exists to align the nation upon a common ground of facts, so a uniformly informed mass of citizens can then manage their democracy.

The idea that the nation can and should share one view of reality based on one set of facts is the Cronkite-era myth of mass media: And that’s the way it is.But it wasn’t. The single shared viewpoint was imposed by the means of media production: broadcast uniformity replaced media diversity.

Now that era is over. What the internet kills is the mass media business model, with it mass media, and with it the idea of “the mass” as the homogenized, melted pot of citizens.

I’ll argue that we are returning to a media model that existed before broadcast: with many voices from and for many worldviews.

We are also returning to an earlier meaning of the word “mass” — from “mass market” to “the masses” as the political mob, the uninformed crowd, the ruly multitude … Trump’s base, in other words. That’s what the tweets above lament: a large proportion of the nation (at least ≈30%) who accept what is fed to them by Fox News and fake news and come out believing, just for example, that Obamacare is dead. What are we to do?

The answer isn’t to hope for a return to the Cronkite myth, for it was a myth. Mainstream media did not reflect reality for countless unreflected, underrepresented, and underserved communities; now, thanks to the net, we can better hear them. And mainstream media did not uniformly inform the entire nation; we just couldn’t know who all was uninformed, but now we have a better sense of our failings.

In 1964, E.V. Walter examined the shift from “the masses” to “mass” in his paper, Mass Society: The late stages of an idea in Social Research. He wrote (his emphases):

In the historical course of the idea, the decade 1930–1939 is a watershed. Before those years, thinking about mass behavior was restricted to dealing with the “mass” as a part of society, examining the conditions that produced it, the types of actions peculiar to it and their implications. After that time, the characteristics of the “mass” were attributed to society as a whole. This change was associated with significant historical events. One was the development of mass media…. The other was the more traumatic development of totalitarian systems…

Mass media, mass marketing, and mass production turned the ugly masses, the mobs, into the good mass, the marketplace-of-all to whom we sold uniform products (news, deodorant, politicians), convincing them that everyone should like what everyone else likes: the rule of the Jones. Well, good-bye to all that.

And so we are properly freaked out today: The mass isn’t a cohesive whole anymore (or now we know better). The masses have re-emerged as a mob and have taken over the country. We’ve seen how this played out before with the rise of totalitarian states riding on the shoulders of unruly, uninformed, angry crowds. “[T]he masses, by definition, neither should nor can direct their own personal existence, and still less rule society in general,” José Ortega y Gasset properly fretted in 1930 in The Revolt of the Masses.

So what do we do? Let’s start by recalling that before the 1920s and radio and the 1950s and television, media better reflected the diversity of society with newspapers for the elite, the working class, the immigrant (54 papers were published in New York in 1865; today we can barely scrape together one that covers the city effectively). Some of those newspapers were scurrilous and divisive. The yellow journalism rags could lie worse than even Fox News and Breitbart. Yet the nation survived and managed its way through an industrial revolution, a civil war, a Great Depression, and two world wars, emerging as a relatively intact democracy. How?

It is tempting to consider ignoring and writing off as hopeless the masses, the third of Americans who take Fox and Trump at their words. Clearly that would not be productive. These people managed to elect a president. That’s how they showed the rest of us they cannot be ignored. I worry about an effort to return to rule by the elite because the elites (the intelligent and the informed) are not the same as the powerful (see: Congress).

It is tempting, too, to pay too much attention to that so-called base, reporting on the lies and myths they believe without challenge. This presents two problems. The first, as pointed out by Ezra Klein, is that the election hinged not on the base but on the hinge.

 

 

The second problem is that by paying so much attention to that base, we risk ignoring the majority of Americans who don’t believe these lies, who don’t approve of Trump’s behavior, who don’t approve of the tax bill just signed. As my Twitter friends love to point out, where have you seen the empathetic stories listening to the plurality of voters who elected Hillary Clinton?

The problem is that we in media keep seeking to cadge together a mass that makes sense. We don’t know how to — or have lost from our ancestral memory the ability to — serve diverse communities.

I argue that one solution is not just diversity in the newsrooms we have but diversity in the news and media ecosystem as a whole, with new and better outlets serving and informing many communities, owned by those communities: African-Americans, Latino-Americans, immigrant Americans, old Americans, young Americans, and, yes, conservative Americans.

We need to work with Facebook particularly to find ways to build bridges among communities, so the demagogues cannot fuel and exploit fear of strangers.

We need to work on better systems of holding both politicians and media to account for lies. Fact-checking is a start but is insufficient. Is there any way to shame Fox News into telling the truth? Is there any way to let its viewers know how they are being lied to and used?

We need to listen to James Carey’s lessons about journalism as transmission of fact (that’s what the exchange above is about) to journalism as a ritual of communication. This is why we need to examine new forms of journalism. (This is why we’re looking to start a lab at the CUNY J-school and why I’m leading a brief class next month in Comedy as a Tool of Journalism — and Journalism as a Tool of Comedy.)

What makes me happy about the Twitter exchange atop this post is that it resets the metric of journalistic success away from audience and attention and toward the outcome that matters: whether the public is informed or not. “Not” should scare the shit out of us.

I’m working on a larger piece (maybe a book or a part of one) about post-mass society and the many implications of this shift. A slice of it is how the mass-media mindset affects our view of our work in journalism and of the structure of politics and society. We need a reset. The bad guys — trolls and Russians, to name a few — have learned that talking to the mass is a waste of time and money and targeting is more effective. They have learned that creating social tokens is a more effective means of informing people than creating articles. We have lessons to learn even from them.

The mass is dead. I don’t regret its passing. In some ways, we need to learn how society managed before media helped create this monster. In other ways, we need to recognize how we can use new tools — the ones the bad guys have exploited first — to better connect and inform and manage society. Let’s begin by recognizing that the goal is not to create one shared view of reality but instead to inform discussion and deliberation among many different communities with different perspectives and needs. That’s what society needs. That’s what journalism must become

Democracy Dies in the Light

December 22, 2017 by Jeff Jarvis
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When the nation’s representatives pass sweeping tax legislation that the majority of voters do not want and that will in the long-run harm most citizens — helping instead corporations, a small, rich elite (including donors), and the politicians themselves — there can be only one interpretation:

Our representatives no longer represent the public; they do not care to. American democracy has died.

Democracy didn’t die in darkness. It died in the light.

The full glare of journalism was turned on this legislation, its impact and motives, but that didn’t matter to those who had the power to go ahead anyway. Journalism, then, proved to be an ineffective protector of democracy, just as it is proving ineffective against every other attack on democracy’s institutions by this gang. Fox News was right to declare a coup, wrong about the source. The coup already happened. The junta is in power. In fact, Fox News led it. We have an administration and Congress that are tearing down government institutions — law enforcement, the courts, the State Department and foreign relations, safety nets, consumer protection, environmental protection — and society’s institutions, starting with the press and science, not to mention truth itself. The junta is, collaborative or independently, doing the bidding of a foreign power whose aim is to get democracy to destroy itself. Journalism, apparently, was powerless to stop any of this.

I don’t mean to say that journalism is solely to blame. But journalism is far from blameless. I have sat in conferences listening to panels of journalists who blame the public they serve. These days, I watch journalists blame Facebook, as if the sickness in American democracy is only a decade old and could be turned on by a machine. I believe that journalism must engage in its own truth and reconciliation process to learn what we have done wrong: how our business models encourage discord and reduction of any complexity to the absurd; how we concentrate on prediction over information and education;how we waste journalistic resource on repetition; how we lately have used ourfalse god of balance to elevate the venal to the normal; how we are redlining quality journalism as a product for the elite. I don’t believe we can fix journalism until we recognize its faults. But I’ll save that for another day. Now I want to ask a more urgent question given the state of democracy.

What should journalism do? Better: What should journalism be? It is obviously insufficient to merely say “this happened today” or “this could happen tomorrow.”

What should journalism’s measures of value be? A stronger democracy? An informed public conversation? Civil discourse? We fail at all those measures now. How can journalism change to succeed at them? What can it do to strengthen — to rescue — democracy? That is the question that consumes me now.

I will start here. We must learn to listen and help the public listen to itself. We in media were never good at listening — not really — but in our defense our media, print and broadcast, were designed for speaking. The internet intervened and enabled everyone to speak but helped no one listen. So now we live in amid ceaseless dissonance: all mouths, no ears. I am coming to see that civility — through listening, understanding, and empathy — is a necessary precondition to learning, to accepting facts and understanding other positions, to changing one’s mind and finding common ground. Thus I have changed my own definition of journalism.

My definition used to be: Helping communities organize their knowledge to better organize themselves. That was conveniently broad enough to fit most any entrepreneurial journalism students’ ideas. It was information based, for that was my presumption — the accepted wisdom — about journalism: It lives to inform. Now I have a new definition of journalism:

To convene communities into civil, informed, and productive conversation.

Journalism — and, I’d argue, Facebook and internet platforms — share this imperative to reduce the polarization we all helped cause by helping citizens find common ground.

This is the philosophy behind our Social Journalism program at CUNY. It is why we at the News Integrity Initiative invested in Spaceship Media’s work, to convene communities in conflict into meaningful conversation. But that is just the beginning.

Clearly, journalism must devote more of its resources to investigation, to making sure that the powerful know they are watched, whether they give a damn or not. Journalism must understand its role as an educator and measure its success or failure based on whether the public is more informed. Journalism and the platforms need to provide the tools for communities to organize and act in collaborative, constructive ways. I will leave this exploration, too, for another day.

We are in a crisis of democracy and its institutions, including journalism. The solutions will not be easy or quick. We cannot get there if we assume what we are living through is a new normal or worse if we make it seem normal. We cannot succeed if we assume our old ways are sufficient for a new reality. We must explore new goals, new paths, new tools, new measures of our work.